Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Reduction of energy consumption may be one of the goals in wireless network design and deployment. For example, heterogeneous cellular networks may optimize network deployment by taking advantage of the heterogeneity of the next generation cellular networks, while attempting to reduce the energy consumption of cellular networks. A network deployment featuring high density deployments of small, low power base stations may achieve higher network energy efficiency than a sparse deployment of few high power base stations. Heterogeneous network deployment may increase network efficiency because it may employ high density and low power base stations. In some scenarios, up to 50 percent reduction of the total base station (BS) power consumption may be achieved, for example.
One of the challenges in heterogeneous cellular networks is to properly associate mobile users with the serving BSs, referred to as the user-BS association computation. This computation may face two challenges: (1) because the coverage area of macro and pico BSs are overlapped, an inefficient user-BS association may result in an extensive interference to the users located at the cell edges of the pico cell, thereby reducing the spectrum efficiency of the cellular network; and (2) given the available bandwidth on both the macro and pico BSs, an inefficient user-BS association may result in either the macro or the pico BSs experiencing heavy traffic congestion. Therefore, the inefficient or incorrect user-BS association may result in underutilization or inefficient use of the available spectrum, and impair the performance of cellular networks.